


Flightless

by Nevi



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-05
Updated: 2015-02-05
Packaged: 2018-03-10 09:29:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3285290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nevi/pseuds/Nevi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes the cages our wings beat against are those of our own creation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flightless

**Author's Note:**

> **Warning: Inquisition spoilers**

He’s nine when he comes across the bird, tethered to the ground by broken wing. He wonders if it would be mercy to simply snap the creatures neck, but when he holds the creature in his small hands and feels the quick beating of its heart against his palm, he wishes nothing more than for the creature to be healed and for it to be free to fly again.

In his chest he feels the beating of the bird’s heart and when moments later the bird sings and pushes from his grasp on mended wing he wonders if the Maker has heard his silent prayer, wonders if the Maker’s work has healed the bird, wonders if the Maker too believes nothing should be so held against its nature.

**

He is twelve when he runs from home. Tears burn hot in his eyes, stinging his cheeks. He didn’t mean to start the fire, it was an accident, _an accident._

They don’t give him a chance to explain. His mother does not look at him, head in her hands, shoulders shaking in grief. His father is livid, eyes wild with fear, a belt raised in his hand to strike…

When the Templars find him he yells for the Maker, for his mother… But the Maker does not hear his prayers this time and the Templars are not kind. And when he is brought to the circle it is with more bruises than his father had ever laid him.

**

The circle is a cage. They cut his skin and take his blood and they call him mage. Here his birth name fades and he takes on the name of his people. _Anders_. He learns about his power under the ever watching eyes of quick tempered Templars. He tries to fit in, to shrink himself, until one day he has made himself so small they do not see it when he runs.

He is a bird soaring in the breeze, flying as far as he can from the tower. He makes it far enough that he thinks he might actually be free, as one day turns to two, then to three and they do not come. But when hunger becomes stronger than fear and he is caught stealing bread they find him.

The place they throw him in the tower is dark, the air stale and he does not see the sun for days.

**

By the time he is fifteen he has escaped four times, four times he has tasted freedom and four months he has sat in the dark isolation of the tower’s basement. His punishment for each attempt.

When he is allowed to return to the apprentice’s quarters there are new faces in the crowd. More children taken from their parents. He talks to a pretty one with long dark hair. He learns she’s a transfer from Kirkwall’s circle. She reads him stories by the hearth and laughs when he scribbles crude drawings of large cats eating Templars in the margins of old books.

He lets the Templars believe he is content with his gilded cage but when the next opportunity for escape shows itself, he will not hesitate to take it.

**

Prior to his harrowing he hears a couple of Templars speak, they are hopeful that he won’t make it through, and that they can finally put the sword to him. He is so filled with rage when the time comes, he almost lets the demon in. But he is stronger than the credit they give him.

When he awakens from his harrowing it’s with a grin on his face.

He celebrates his success with an elven girl in a dark corner of the tower. She is softness and warmth but she isn’t love. They are never love.

**

His next escape earns him a year in solitary, his only companion an old mouser. The cat keeps the loneliness at bay. He can’t say it wasn’t worth it. He tasted freedom and it was honey wine, and dark ale. It was nights in warm beds with warmer bodies. It was fist fights and a broken lip. It was rain on his face in the dark hours of the night and cool waterfalls in the summer heat. Freedom to choose. Freedom to follow the sea or the road. Freedom to be.

He holds these memories close during those dark days. They are tinder for the fires of freedom that burn him from within.

Sometimes the Templar that brings him his meals is the handsome one with the curly hair, the one that fancies his friend from Kirkwall. Sometimes Anders can sway him for a paltry piece of news from the rooms above. Other times the Templar is the green eyed bastard from Cumberland. The one who spits in his meal before shoving it through the door. The one who likes to point his sword at Anders’ chest and make veiled threats.

Anders isn’t sorry when he hears of _his_ death to a rage demon months later. He is sorry when he doesn’t see his kitty friend again.

**

The next time he escapes he goes after his phylactery; the one item out there that means certain recapture. But before he can collect it he is caught again and only by the graces of chaos does he break free again.

Broken bodies on the ground, twisted bent Templars and darkspawn burned by fire and ice.

A grey warden arrives amidst it all. He knows her.

_They tumble laughing from the bunk. Twisted limbs and sheets and her sharp fingers that find all of his soft spots. How did he not know he was this ticklish?_

She greets him with a smile. She seems older then the last time he saw her, but then he must be too. She has a title now he thinks, Hero of Ferelden they call her, a mage of all things. He wonders if he could do that, be a hero, be a mage that others could look at with reverence rather than fear.

When she gives him the opportunity to try he takes it.

Being a warden feels like freedom at first. There is adventure, there is ale and comradery and warm beds with warmer bodies. But eventually he finds he has just traded one cage for another. He is not free. He is a mage. Mages will never be free.

**

It’s a spirit of justice that makes him see the injustice of it all. He goes against everything the circle taught him by letting the spirit in. They call him apostate. They call him reckless. They call him abomination.

They do not call him what he is…

He is _justice._ He is _vengeance._

He flees to Kirkwall. He hides among the ruined and desperate and he tries to help. Kirkwall is a city on the brink, history steeped in the oppression of others, a city of chains built on the bones of slaves. Kirkwall is where he witnesses the true brutality capable of the Templar order. And where he falls in love.

Kirkwall is where he loses a friend he’d sought to free and finds another in the process.

She is fire made human. A mage that has never seen the inside of a circle. She is a hawk that has never been caged, a hawk who would rather die than have her wings clipped.

She is fury.

He is broken.

He tells her as much, tries to push her away. But he is a moth to the flame, and she glows brighter than the sun. He never had a chance.

Justice calls her an obsession, a distraction from their cause. But she fights at his side when he asks, she listens and she does not judge him.

Warm hands pressing into his chest, soft lips whispering secrets into his skin. She is a beacon in the chaos of his thoughts. A lifeline in the madness.

And he breaks a rule.

He calls her _love._

But in the end how much he loves her does not matter.

There are too many injustices in Kirkwall and he sees them all. He cannot pretend to be blind to the torture and murder of mages, of the downtrodden and the oppressed. Justice cannot be had for some and not others. Justice is stronger than any one thought, vengeance is stronger than any one man.

If the world is to end in fire, he will be the fuse.

**

_Revolution._

The mages rise against their oppressors, against those that would keep them chained for the gift the Maker bestowed upon them.

The morning sun is red with blood, ashes in the wind. The Hawke is circling, blood on her lips, predatory eyes on him. She captures his mouth with hers and it reminds him that he’s alive. He can taste the lyrium on her tongue the magic in her blood, warm and smoky like a campfire, like the city that burns at their feet.

He is alive. He shouldn’t be alive.

He has never been so happy to be alive.

He kisses her again and again and again…

**

Winter in Ferelden is cold. He can’t seem to stay warm no matter how many furs he wears. Not without her. On the wind is the howl of the great wolf, the sky has broken open and his blood has been singing. The lullaby is quieter here than it was in the Free Marches but he still finds himself humming along with the tune.

It has been weeks since he last saw his love. Weeks since she donned her armour and staff and took the road north. Weeks since she kissed him and told him to wait for her, told him she would return. It is weeks more when a letter arrives. It is delivered by scouts in inquisition colours. The envelope is unassuming but the graceful lines that spell his name on it tell him everything…

It is not her writing.

Justice is quiet when he reads. The letters on the page blur and twist under the weight of the words, words like hero, and sacrifice and saved. Words that read like a grey warden obituary. But he was the grey warden, not her. It should have been him…it should have been…

_Children with honey coloured hair playing in the sand. Soft kisses on tired heads and eyes as he tucks them into their beds. Hawke standing at the doorway a smile, a promise on her lips._

His heart is shattered glass, cutting from the inside till his skin cracks with light so bright and hot the cabin may just catch on fire. Then like a sharp summer wind on kindling it is gone. There is no room for justice in this world.

Hot tears twining together, tiny rivers on his cheeks that waterfall to the floor. Sorrow rising in great hiccupping breaths.

He is a bird tethered by broken wing. He is a creature named regret, bound to a cage of his own making.

That night and every night after he sees her in his dreams. She is a blinding pillar of light that breaks against the darkness of the fade. She is a spirit of fury, a demon of rage. But when he takes her hand she walks from the fire burning her with in.

In his dreams he can wrap his arms around her and neither are possessed by their demons.

In his dreams she calls him love.

But love is not a spirit of the fade.

And he never flies again.


End file.
